by Thom Jones
When it dawned on Crusoe that they weren’t going to come back, he moved inland and made a hut for himself. He became self-sufficient and industrious out of necessity, and learned to take a special pleasure in doing things patiently and well. There were goats on the island, coconuts, pineapples, fish, edible tubers, breadfruit, etc. Also, Crusoe had a splendid view. In a way it was a kind of tropical paradise. By and by Robinson Crusoe captured a number of goats and cut their Achilles’ tendons to keep them near his shack. Rats were a problem and often bit his toes to the bone as he slept, but he found some wild cats, stole some kittens, raised them, and trained them to sleep with him and kill the rats. This formerly bitter, angry man was said to have come close to God and learned to love Him. Living on pure foods, breathing fresh air, taking in sunshine and the tranquil sound of the surf, he became more healthy and his sense of hearing and eyesight became remarkably keen.
He became a prime physical specimen. He could run a goat down, pounce on it, and slit its throat with his dirk knife. Once, he jumped on a goat that was feeding on the edge of a thirty-foot precipice obscured by dense brush. They both went over and Crusoe, although he landed on the goat, killing it, was so injured himself that he could not move for three days. When he recovered and went back to his hut, the idea of his old age and inevitable helplessness became an idée fixe. Portuguese sailors often stopped at the island for food and water, but to reveal himself to them, he knew, would amount to suicide. If they didn’t kill him, they would literally make him a galley slave.
Eventually an English ship laid anchor near his island and he went down to greet them in his beard and goatskins and was rescued. What a tale he had to tell.
The real Robinson Crusoe was quickly disillusioned when he returned to England. After a brief moment of sensational attention, he reverted to his old ways, drinking and making trouble. He lost access to God. Finally, he went off, far off in the country, and lived in a sod hut dreaming of his idyllic days of paradise on his island, where he lived less than six years altogether.
I think human beings are despicable. I am sick of saving their miserable lives. I would like to take a boat and my two German shepherds and go off to a tropical island. If anything happens, I can save my own life, pull my own teeth, perform minor surgery. Before I go, I’d have my appendix removed. I know the medicines I need to take and I can get them. I’m sick of junkies, prostitutes, alcoholic street bums, and killers, but they depress me far less than would, say, a Beverly Hills clientele.
I do love my dogs, however.
I’m scheduled to work the weekend night shift at the Valley General Emergency Room. There’s a full moon out. I find that it’s kinda hard to find access to God in Valley General’s ER, especially on a full-moon weekend.
Dufaye owes me a favor. I’ll twist his arm and get him to work my rotation. Tell him I got G.I. pain, fake a fever, and get someone to slice that appendix.
A guy driving around Cape Cod suffering from existential despair! Clendon and his Volvo. Victoria and her tits. Those fat kids and all of that prosperity. It just depressed the hell out of me!
There are lots of uninhabited islands in Fiji. Me and the dogs, we’re going to pull a Robinson Crusoe. Cutter’s Insect Repellent. I’m going to take a whole case of that shit.
I can’t stand mosquitoes.
A White Horse
AD MAGIC HAD one of his epileptic premonitions a split second before the collision, and managed to approximate a tuck-and-roll position just as the truck smashed into the back of the mini tour bus. He was seated in the center of the back row enduring the most horrendous hangover of his life when the crash projected him halfway down the center aisle like a human cannonball. There was a moment of stillness after the accident, and then the bus lurched over to the side of the road. A group of five men and a woman from Bahrain sitting in the center of the bus, themselves somewhat discombobulated but unhurt, got out of their seats to help the peculiar American to his feet.
Ad Magic had a jawbreaker-size horehound lozenge in his cheek when the wreck occurred, and now it was caught at the back of his throat. He attempted to swallow the candy discreetly, lodging it farther into his throat, and when he realized it was too large to swallow he tried to cough it up. He panicked as he began to run out of air, however, and dropped to one knee and choked out a cartoonish series of coughs—“Kaff, kaff, kaff.”
He could feel a heat wave beneath his breastbone which radiated up to his face and ears, burning like wildfire as he turned to the Bahrainis with furious gesticulations, indicating that he needed someone to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him. The Bahrainis soon got the gist of his problem and began slapping Ad Magic’s back, while he clutched his throat like a man being hanged.
At last one of the Bahrainis socked him mightily on the spine with the side of his fist, and, ka-zeem!, the lozenge shot out of Ad Magic’s mouth, bounced off the windshield of the bus, and fell into the driver’s lap. As Ad Magic began to breathe again, a great laugh exploded among the Bahrainis, who were at once relieved and amused by the absurdity of the entire scene. Ad Magic had spent the better part of a day with these people, and while he was grateful to be breathing, he felt that their laughter was tinged with ridicule and hostility, as had been their whole repertoire of Jerry Lewis hilarity. When they cried mocking insults at the enormous statue of a serene, meditating Buddha in the caves of Elephanta, for instance, they stirred up a thousand and one bats, which came screeching past Ad Magic in such profusion that he was buffeted by their wings and their surprisingly hefty bodies. He slipped in bat guano in an attempt to duck under the flock, falling on his knee and hand. The guano was an inch deep and felt like a cold pudding. Fortunately, one of the Bahrainis had a package of Handi Wipes, and he was able to clean the worst of it off, although the stench persisted, and he could still smell it whenever his hand was in proximity to his face.
The bus, with a blown tire, wheeled onto the shoulder of Marine Drive, one of Bombay’s busiest streets. Ad Magic straight-armed the side emergency-exit door and staggered outside. He could breathe well enough, but his throat felt bruised. He shucked off his teal-green cashmere V-neck sweater. It had been madness wearing that. The air outside the bus was humid and suffocating. Ad Magic recognized Chowpatty Beach and realized he was on a peninsula that extended into the Arabian Sea like a finger. He knew that Bombay consisted of a series of islands off the coast of India, and that from this point he was less than a few miles from the Gateway of India, where the tour had originated.
A small boy, about eight or ten—it was hard to tell, partly because he had a shaved head—approached Ad Magic, carrying a rhesus monkey on his shoulder. The monkey, dressed in a dirty red uniform with epaulets, gold piping, and a tiny bellman’s cap, began an incomprehensible performance in the art of mime. When it was over, the monkey approached the American and presented its upturned hat to him as a collection cup. Ad Magic began to cough again as he fished in his pockets. He placed a half-dozen rupees in the monkey’s cap and tossed his expensive sweater to the boy. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take it. It’s all yours.”
The Bahraini woman had seen the monkey’s performance and emitted a shrill, trilling cry. One of the men, who could speak a little English, said facetiously, “Bravo. Excellent monkey.”
The tour guide climbed out of the bus and callously questioned the American about his condition. Ad Magic said he was all right, and then she chastised him for giving so much money to the boy. “Not is good,” she said with a sneer. Ad Magic walked away from the guide and the Bahrainis, wanting nothing more to do with them. He moved from the road onto the sand of Chowpatty Beach, and when he felt sufficiently separated from them he turned and watched as the guide skillfully led the party of Bahrainis across the whizzing four-lane traffic of Marine Drive and into a decrepit establishment called the New Zealand Café.
There were billboards on either side of the grimy, stuccoed building. One, in English, advertised Gabriel shock absorbers. The other, fe
aturing an apparently famous Indian leading man, who had sort of a Rudolph Valentino look, was in Hindi. It was an advertisement for men’s hairdressing. Beyond the café, through the filter of buzzing traffic and the haze of diesel fuel, Ad Magic spotted a cardboard shantytown. The settlement was centered around a crescent-shaped drainage ditch, and people could be seen squatting there, shamelessly relieving themselves, while at the other end of the obscene ditch, women were washing laundry.
Looking into the restaurant, Ad Magic could see one of the Bahrainis clutching his throat and pretending to choke while the rest of the party laughed. Their mouths were opened wide, revealing an abundance of golden inlays. They waved to him and cheered heartily. He wondered why they were so jolly. Why couldn’t he be like that?
Out front, the bus driver was quarreling with the driver of the truck that had rear-ended the tour bus. Ad Magic turned away again and walked toward the Arabian Sea, out of the envelope of diesel exhaust into a small, pleasantly pungent pocket of gardenia, and then back into a zone of a truly ghastly odor. The tuna cannery in American Samoa had been bad, but it was nothing compared with these little pockets of smell that were all over Bombay, and what was worse was that you had to be nonchalant about it with your fellow travelers and not complain, for no one else seemed to notice it. Ad Magic was suddenly overcome by a sense of unreality—he wondered if he had been to American Samoa at all, or if it had been a dream, and, indeed, if the Bombay of the here and now was a dream.
He surveyed the long, deserted stretch of beach, and spotted a small white horse standing forlornly in the surf. As he moved closer to the horse he saw that it was old and swaybacked, covered with oozing sores, and so shrunken that its ribs protruded and its teeth seemed overly large. The horse was having a hard time staying on its feet, and Ad Magic watched it reel. There were plenty of scenes of poverty and desolation in India, but this was the most abject and miserable sight he had ever laid eyes on. Clearly, the horse was going to die—possibly within the hour. Had it been meant to die so completely alone—abandoned? It occurred to Ad Magic that it was the suffering of a horse that had finally driven Friedrich Nietzsche into an irretrievable insanity in the month of January 1889.
Good God! He had done it again. He had abandoned his seizure meds, flipped out, and somehow gotten on a plane, this time bound for India. He frantically searched his pockets for a passport. There was none. He had no wallet, either—only an enormously fat roll of American hundred-dollar bills, some loose smaller bills mixed with Indian currency, and a ball of heavy change that caused his pocket to bulge. He didn’t even know his own name; he knew only “Ad Magic,” but as he sorted out the loose cash he discovered a room key from the Taj Inter-Continental. “Suite 7” was imprinted on the tag, and Ad Magic knew that the secret to his identity would be found there, although he was in no particular hurry to return to the hotel. Somehow he felt that it would be better not to know, at least not yet.
His throat continued to bother him. As he rifled through his pockets, he found a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a beautiful gold lighter. He extracted a cigarette and lit it. The boy with the monkey appeared at his side and bummed a smoke. Ad Magic lit it for him, and watched the boy pass the cigarette to the monkey, who held it in the fashion of an aristocratic S.S. officer in an old black-and-white Second World War movie. The monkey smoked as though he had a real yen for nicotine, and after this demonstration he presented his little bellman’s cap for another tip. Ad Magic gave him a five-dollar bill and then sat down on a small, rusting Ferris wheel, looking out at the horse again. He took a drag off his cigarette, and on his wrist he noticed a stainless-steel Med-Alert bracelet and a solid-gold Rolex. He examined them both with curiosity, as if he had never seen them before. The little bracelet was inscribed with the word “Epilepsy.”
Epilepsy. Ad Magic did not have epilepsy in the classic sense, with full-blown, convulsive seizures. He was a temporal-lobe epileptic. He remembered this now. He had suffered an epileptic fugue. He still wasn’t sure what his name was, where he lived, whether he was married, whether he had children, or much else, but he did know himself to be an advertising man. That, and an epileptic. He quite clearly remembered the voice of his doctor, the large, high-ceilinged consulting room trimmed in dark oak, a door with a frosted-glass window, and a hands-clasped-in-prayer statue on the doctor’s desk. Ad Magic remembered spending hours from early adolescence into maturity in that room. He remembered majestic oak trees, crisp autumn afternoons, the smell of burning leaves, and the palatial brownstone estates of a Midwestern city, but he could not identify the city, could not picture the doctor or remember his name. He did know the man had been more than a doctor to him—he had been a good friend as well, a man whom Ad Magic loved very much. He suspected that the doctor was now dead, but he distinctly remembered something the doctor had told him about his condition. “These spells you have, where you go gadding about the world—they could be a form of epileptic fugue, or you could be suffering from the classical form of global amnesia, which is so often depicted on television soap operas. They are very common in television melodrama but almost unheard of in real life. But so, too, are psychomotor fugues, which are a kind of status epilepticus of the left temporal lobe.”
Ad Magic didn’t know who he was or how he had come to India. He only knew that there were times when he became so depressed and irritable and finally so raving mad that he had to throw his medication away, bolt out, and intoxicate himself or in some way extinguish his consciousness. He felt this way now. He felt a loathing for everything on the face of the earth, including himself—but the suffering of this white horse was something he could not abide. It was a relief, suddenly, to have something other than himself and his hangover on which to fix his attention.
He summoned the boy, who was now proudly wearing the cashmere sweater, and took him and the monkey across the road to the New Zealand Café. The air inside was laden with cooking grease and cigarette smoke, but a pair of ceiling fans beat through the haze like inverted helicopters. A waiter in a dingy white jacket was serving tea and a plate of sticky cookies to the Bahrainis. From the kitchen, a radio blared a tinny version of “Limehouse Blues.” Ad Magic pulled a chair up next to the tour guide and said, “Ask the boy who that horse on the beach belongs to.”
The guide was a good-looking woman in her late thirties, who fluctuated mercurially between obsequiousness and sullen aggression. She wore an orange sari that seemed immaculately clean. Ad Magic wondered how she managed that, after the boat trip to Elephanta and the long Bombay city tour. He watched her interrogate the boy. Then she turned to Ad Magic and said, “Horse belongs to circus man, and cannot work anymore. Wandering horse now. Free to come and go.”
Ad Magic asked the guide whether she could make a phone call and summon a veterinarian.
“Veterinarian?” she said, reacting to the word bitterly, as if he had made an indecent request.
“You’re right. That’s silly, isn’t it. There must not be any veterinarians, or, if any, relatively few on call, even in such a sophisticated city as Bombay—and you’ve been through a long day, and now the bus has been wrecked. Forgive me. I’m not feeling very well today. Let me ask you. Can you tell me at which hotel I am staying?”
“The Taj,” she said.
“Right, the Taj. That’s what I thought.” Ad Magic placed a half-dozen American ten-dollar bills on the table. “Please accept this little gratuity. You’ve been marvelous. Now, I wonder if you can call a real doctor. Tell him I will make it truly worth his while. The boy and I will wait for him across the road, on the beach. I’ll get back to the hotel on my own. It is the Taj, isn’t it?” The woman nodded.
Ad Magic and the boy, with the monkey on his shoulder, crossed the road again and sat on a pair of broken merry-go-round horses that were detached from an abandoned carousel. Next to the carousel was the small Ferris wheel, contrived to be powered by a horse or mule rather than a motor. Nearby was a ticket kiosk decorated with elephant-me
n and monkey-men painted in brilliant, bubblegum colors. The carnival was defunct and depressing. Ad Magic remembered bright lights—a carnival of his childhood, before he had picked up on the tawdriness of carnivals and saw only the enchanting splendor of them. He couldn’t have been more than four. He was sitting in a red miniature car when he saw one of a different color—yellow—that he liked better. Impulsively, he scrambled for the better car. Just as he unbuckled his seat belt and was halfway out of the red one, the ride began and he fell, catching his arm under the car, wrenching and skinning his elbow, and bashing his face against the little vehicle’s fake door. Suddenly he was plucked free by a man in a felt hat and a raincoat, who smelled pleasantly of aftershave. His father? A stranger? He wasn’t sure; there was no face, as there had been no face on the doctor.
He searched his pockets for his cigarettes and discovered a small, flat, green-and-black tin of Powell’s Headache Tablets. He took two of these, dry-swallowed them, and then lit up another cigarette. He spotted an empty tour bus pulling up alongside the damaged bus he had arrived in, and from his seat on the rusting pony Ad Magic watched his party emerge from the New Zealand Café, board the new bus, and take off. There was no goodbye wave, even from the friendly Bahrainis. Again he tried to recover his name and city of origin, but it was hopeless. At least he had come to Bombay rather than Lusaka, or Lima, or Rangoon, or Zanzibar. He remembered coming into Zanzibar on a steamer, seasick—the odor of the spices was so powerful he could smell it twenty miles offshore. He remembered feeling instantly well when the boat reached the harbor, and how the inhabitants of the city were outside—it was midnight—marveling at the recently installed streetlights. An Australian tourist told him that Zanzibar was the last place in the world to get streetlights and that when the bulbs burned out the streetlights would never glow again unless Swiss workers were imported to come in and change them. “The bloody buggers can’t even change a light bulb,” the Australian said. “It isn’t in their makeup.” Ad Magic’s recollection of Zanzibar was like an Alice-in-Wonderland hallucination. It seemed that he had remained stranded there for weeks, almost penniless, living on bread and oranges.